The new outdoor advertising for the California Milk Board’s “Got Milk?” campaign was to feature the aroma of freshly baked cookies, but due to the stink raised by some activist groups, the scent strips were removed one day after they were placed in bus shelters in San Francisco. See story. So was the idea of using the smell of fresh-baked cookies to sell milk half-baked?

Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of the milk board’s ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, is reported to have written “I guess The City has once again made herself safe for bus shelters that smell like urine and vomit …”

While some might find it uncalled for, Jeff’s comment, quoted in Ad Age, reflects the frustration of marketers who seek to extend the brand experience in novel ways only to be rebuffed by skeptical colleagues or thwarted by unforeseen barriers to implementation.

Back in 2004, I helped design and execute a project to help illustrate Martin Lindstrom’s book BRAND sense. The question I sought to investigate was, if people have a stronger memory of the sensory brand experience, does it lead to stronger brand loyalty? Initially I was a little skeptical about the utility of the project, but as it progressed I became a firm believer in the potential power of sensory branding.

We experience the world through our senses – all five of them. This fact is so obvious that most of us are oblivious to it most of the time.  As marketers, we spend a lot of time worrying about how our brands look, or how they are presented on TV, in print or online. We are fixated on the visual sense, but do we recognize what is going on under our noses, or at the ends of our fingertips? In reality, all five senses work in concert to define our experience of brands but we tend to ignore the important role that smell, taste, and touch can play in developing strong brands.

There is firm evidence that smell can have a dramatic effect on purchasing behavior. Alan R Hirsch, M.D., F.A.C.P., a neurologist and psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of smell and taste loss, is the Neurological Director of the Smell & Taste Research and Treatment Foundation in Chicago. He reports a test where people were exposed to identical pairs of Nike shoes in two different rooms. One room was scented with a floral fragrance, while the other was fragrance free. Among test subjects who inspected each pair of shoes and answered a questionnaire, 84 percent preferred the shoes from the scented room, and estimated them to be worth $10 more (on average) than the pair in the room with filtered air. Other work has suggested that the aroma of apple pies baking produced a strong incremental effect on the sales of ovens.

Apparently the scent that helps to sell ovens can also help people feel at home. Earlier this year Starwood Hotels and Resorts announced that the signature scent for Sheraton Four Points would be that of apple cinnamon pie. Called Uncomplicated Comfort, the scent joins White Tea (Westin) and Welcoming Warmth with fig, bergamot, jasmine and freesin (Sheraton) on Starwood’s scent roster.

While most relevant to retail and hospitality brands, scent has also, for some time,  been of interest to marketers of other types of brands. In 2003, after developing various scents and testing them among consumers, General Motors introduced a fragrance for their luxury line of Cadillac cars called “Nuance,” which is impregnated into the leather of the car before it leaves the factory. 

Incorporating the sense of smell into our experience with a product is relatively easy to do in some categories, and harder in others. But sensory branding does not necessarily have to be applied at the point of purchase, or even in the presence of the product. Over lunch recently, I talked with Don Diforio of the ARF about whether the sense of taste could be relevant to cars. I asked Don what a Mercedes might taste like. He suggested dark chocolate. If that response were representative, how might Mercedes act on the insight? What if the company were to send boxes of sophisticated German chocolates to new Mercedes owners shortly after they’ve taken delivery of their new vehicles? That would add to the sensory brand experience and also indicate that Mercedes cares about its customers. 

So to me, the idea of using the smell of fresh-baked cookies to advertise milk hardly seems half-baked. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to extend the sensory experience of “Got Milk’s?” TV ads (such as Heaven and Hell, from 2004), to other venues, since, from childhood on, there is a natural association in the minds of most American consumers between cookies and milk. I bet there are other U.S. business travelers who share my fond memories of the warm cookies and milk that American Airlines used to serve on their flights. So it is not a big stretch to imagine that the question “Got Milk?” would have much more power when associated by the smell of fresh-baked cookies, even in the rather odd surrounding of a bus shelter.

This said, Goodby, Silverstein and the Milk Marketing Board would hardly be the first to run into objections when trying to harness the power of the senses to build a brand. It is reputed that Nestle once introduced special ice cream freezers into convenience stores, designed to remind people of the Nestle’s commercials. Each time a chest was opened, the advertising jingle rang out. Angry shop keepers, fed up with listening to the repeated jingle, demanded the removal of the freezers soon after their introduction.

Other ideas for sensory branding never pass the colleague sniff test. At our lunch, Don recounted how the marketing team at Washington Mutual was frustrated by the lack of understanding among Senior Managers about the advantages of improving the sensory experience of the bank’s retail outlets. And yet, as a bank visitor I would welcome anything that made the experience a more pleasant one.

So what would you prefer your local bus shelter to smell of? As Jeff Goodby suggests, I can think of worse things than chocolate chip cookies. but maybe this intrusion of marketing into yet another aspect of our lives is going just one sense too far. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Brands, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page